Masahiro Sakurai (the creator of Kirby and Smash Bros) has a YouTube channel on game design. Obviously, he’s an expert in action games, but I think there are lessons you can apply even to analog, narrative games like the sort I’m most interested in. Take this video about Hit Stops:
https://youtu.be/OdVkEOzdCPw
You can’t shake the frame when a character dies in a tabletop RPG, but you can still pause the story and zoom in on their death, narratively spotlighting the death and making their loss meaningful. And different games can do this in different ways.
Some games are like the example shmup in the video, where the actual death is given very little fanfare. In 5th edition D&D, there are a load of rules about how your character clings to life when reduced to 0 hp. But the actual rule for dying is only six words long: “On your third failure [of a death save], you die.” There’s no mourning the dead, no concern for the tragedy of a life snuffed out. There’s not even a pause in the combat initiative order. One round, you’re alive. Six seconds later, you’re rolling up a replacement PC.
(D&D does have lots of rules for characters clinging to life, at 0 HP, stabilizing, recovering, etc. There’s a lot of focus on remaining in the fight, maintaining hope you’ll pull through. But all the focus is on the before-you-die part, none at all on the character once they have died.)
Compare that to say, Cthulhu Dark‘s rules for how you lose a PC. The rules for that game specifically say “When your Insight reaches 6, you understand the full horror behind the Universe and leave everyday life behind. To the outside world, you appear insane. This is a special moment: everyone focusses on your Investigator’s last moments of lucidity. Go out however you want: fight, scream, run, collapse or go eerily silent.”
The game explicitly states that everyone pause and focus in on the PC as they irretrievably slip away from the rational world. And it explicitly gives the player of that character a moment to be in the spotlight: to have their character’s final moment take whatever form they specifically wish. This is the narrative equivalent of that moment where the game pauses as the spaceship is hit by an enemy fireball: everyone stops what they’re doing to bear witness to the loss of the PC, and the player of the dying PC is given the chance to ham it up as much as they wish.
(You can also tell this is an important moment, because the rules focus more attention on it. The whole of Cthulhu Dark is only about 1100 words long, but this rule is 73 words long, or ~6.6% of the total game text. Compare that to the 6 words D&D devotes to dying in the 8000 word combat chapter, or who know how many tens of thousands of words of complete D&D text.)
Dread artfully creates that same spotlight effect, without needing the rules to force the matter, just through the mechanism of the tower falling. Up to that moment, everyone has been tensely watching the players make pulls. Then all of a sudden the tower comes crashing down – or a player chooses to knock it over themself. And that crash is a big moment of emotional release, a sudden catharsis. No one will fail to notice that a PC died in a Dread game. Heck, if you’re ever in a convention hall with a Dread game nearby, you’ll know when the PCs die even if you don’t know anything else about the game whatsoever. If any game has the equivalent of “pause and shake and slow down” then it’s Dread. (The “slow down” portion is rebuilding the tower afterward, a moment without the normal narrative tension of the game that slowly leads back into regular gameplay after a PC dies.)
None of this is really about character death. It’s really a question of where the game rules focus your attention and how. In Smash Bros, they want you to notice when hits land, so they pause the action on the frame of a hit. In a romance game, you might want the “hit stop” to occur when two characters kiss (compare Dread and Star Crossed) or betray one another. In a cozy game, maybe all the “hit stops” focus in on delightful moments of whimsy, or on small moments of kindness (which is how my pastoral flail snail farming game worked).
All RPG systems focus your attention on certain aspects of the story and not on others. Game design is often about how you make people notice the parts that are important to you about the story you’re telling, how you make a single narrative moment have an emotional impact in the player.
And even if a game’s mechanics don’t require focusing in on important moments, good players (including a GM if there is one) will want to spotlight these key moments. I just think that it can be easy to miss these moments if the system doesn’t encourage paying attention for them. It’s a matter of permission versus tools, which is a different post for a different day.